Speakers Fall 2014

Kai Johnson

Exact Target Marketing Cloud

HR Program Manager

Kai Johnson is a Purdue Alum who is a leader in providing cross channel digital marketing solutions that empower organizations of various sizes to be able to communicate with their customers through a variety of mediums.

Over the past few years, Kai served as a Inclusion & Diversity Consultant for Humana. Her areas of focus included being responsible for marketing and branding Humana’s Inclusion and Diversity programs Initiatives. She also developed the 2012 and 2013 Inclusion and Diversity Reports in order to communicate the scope of Humana’s program. Additionally, she also communicated I&D news, events and monthly heritage celebrations to the internal associates.

Kai’s passion is being able to communicate with the people around her and help increase performance and professional development through Human Resources.

Amber joins the Krannert Professional Development Center with a background in Psychology and Human Resources. She attended Purdue University as an undergrad, receiving a BA in Psychology.

She then started working as a Human Resources Generalist for a division of United Technologies Corporation. In this role, her primary focus was on recruiting and staffing, including involvement with the intern/co-op programs.

With her background in HR, Amber hopes to bring an employer's perspective to her role within the KPDC. As Assistant Director, Amber supports both Corporate and Student Career Development. She also meets with students individually to support their professional development. She enjoys building relationships with the students as well as with employers as they seek to recruit Krannert undergraduate students and graduates.

Linda is responsible for building the capability of the Company’s IDS function as well as providing IDS governance oversight. Linda also oversees Information Technology Development & Operations, Innovation, Corporate Information Security and Employee Services for P&G’s Global Business Services (GBS) organization aimed to help P&G people work simpler, faster, and with greater agility.

Linda is a member of P&G’s Global Leadership Council and recently served as the Company’s Chief Diversity Officer. Linda joined P&G in 1983 as a systems analyst, going on to become a global “executive of firsts” across several disciplines. She was the first African-American senior vice president in the IT function, and the first female African-American senior vice president, and now president, within P&G. She led the first vision and strategy for P&G’s e-mail system, led the partnership with HP to provide core information technology services, and spearheaded delivery of broad business and employee services to Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. As Chief Diversity Officer, Linda crafted the first company-wide diversity and inclusion strategy and established P&G’s first ever Global Inclusion & Diversity Council, significantly elevating P&G’s Diversity Inc. and Working Mother Magazine rankings.

Melissa Evens seeks to engage in outreach with active military and veterans to foster participation in academic programs and also develops new programming for the veteran community.

She is also the Administrative Director for the EBV at Purdue. A national program, the Entrepreneurship Boot camp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV) offers cutting edge, experiential training in entrepreneurship and small business management to post-9/11 veterans with disabilities resulting from their military service to our country.

Melissa supports social entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives of the Krannert School and is administrative director for global social entrepreneurship and social innovation initiatives and programs. Presently, Melissa is working on a Social Entrepreneurship Certificate through the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship in collaboration with New York University, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of North Texas.

Annie serves as an Academic Advisor for undergraduate students in the Krannert School of Management. In this role, Annie also serves as the advisor to the School of Management Council (SMC) and teaches a section of Management 100.

Originally hailing from the beautiful Pacific Northwest, Annie received her undergraduate degree from Eastern Washington University. She continued pursuing her education, receiving a Master of Arts in Higher Education degree from Geneva College in 2011. Upon her graduation Annie has been happily serving students here at Purdue, beginning in University Residences as a Residential Education Coordinator before joining the Krannert Advising team in the fall of 2013.

Dr. Julia Kalish

Krannert School of Management

Interim Associate Dean- Online and Professional Learning at Purdue University

Dr. Kalish’s current role at Krannert focuses on ensuring that there is a state authorization compliance for all of purdue campuses in all the states. She focuses on developing strategies to simplify future compliance requirements and systematizing procedures for all existing current information.

Dr. Kalish previous role included being a Continuous Term Lecturer at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University. She taught a wide range of courses, including Operations Management, Project Management, and Supply Chain Management. Her research interests include continuous quality improvement, crisis logistics, lean/green supply chains, and ergonomics. She will be redesigning her MGMT 361 course, Operations Management, which focuses on introducing basic operations concepts such as quality improvement, lean supply chains, inventory management, and capacity constraints.

Rusty Rueff

The Grammy Foundation

Chairman

Rusty’s most current project was in his position as a CEO in which he led SNOCAP, Inc. from 2005 until the successful acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April, 2008. SNOCAP was the world’s first end-to-end solution for digital licensing and copyright management services empowering record labels and individual artists to monetize their digital creations on popular sites such as MySpace and other social networks.

Prior he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources for Electronic Arts (EA). Joining EA in 1998, he was responsible for global Human Resources, Talent Management, Corporate Services, Facilities and Real Estate, Corporate Communications, and Government Affairs, reporting to EA’s Chairman and CEO. In 2003, Fortune Magazine named EA one of the “Top 100 Places to Work For” in the United States.

Dr. Susan B. Butler

SBB Institute for the Development of Women and

The Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence at Purdue

CEO

Susan Butler is also a distinguished alumna of Krannert School of Management where she earned her honorary doctorate. She was hired as the first woman professional at Arthur Andersen and eventually became the first woman partner at the firm.

Susan B. Butler is also the author of Becoming the CEO of You, Inc. In her book, she strives to inspire women to take initiative in their life and drive them to make things happen for them not to them.

Dr. Alok Chaturvedi

Krannert School of Management

Professor

Director, SEAS Laboratory

Dr. Alok R. Chaturvedi is a Professor in Purdue University’s Krannert Graduate School of Management and the Department of Computer Sciences (courtesy) and the Founder, Chairman, and the CEO of Simulex Inc., a Modeling and Simulation Company located in Purdue Technology Park. He is the technical lead for US Department of Defense’s Sentient World Simulation project. Dr. Chaturvedi is the founding Director of Purdue Homeland Security Institute and has also served as an Adjunct Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), Alexandria, Virginia – a leading think tank on national and homeland securities matters.

Dr. Chaturvedi has been working on multi-agent synthetic environments for over fifteen years. He has led a team of researchers to develop the Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS). SEAS is extensively being used by the US Department of Defense for war games, experimentations, planning, analysis, operations, and shaping in multiple theaters. National Training Simulations Association (NTSA) recognized SEAS as the best simulation for analysis in all of Department of Defense for the year 2005.

Melissa Law-Penrose

Krannert School of Management

Academic Advisor

Melissa Law-Penrose received her Bachelors in Psychology and her Masters in International Peace and Conflict Resolution. She currently works as an advisor to assist students in furthering their education.

Previous roles that she has taken on include being the associate for peacemaking initiatives and a family advocate/mental health worker. Overall, her focus in her career thus far was finding ways to assist those around her increase their wellbeing.

Jared Law-Penrose

Krannert School at Mananagement

2nd Year Student

Jared received his bachelor’s degree in communication 2008 and eventually ended up traveling to Nizhniy Novogord State University in Russia to conduct cross cultural media exportation. His then presented his research at the 2007 International Association of Media and Communication Research in Paris. Much of his research focuses on non-profit human resource management, restorative justice within organization and intersection of leadership and trust.

Charisse Williams

Deloitte Consulting

Business Technology Analyst

Charisse Williams is a Purdue and Business Opportunity Program alumna. She has interned in several different companies including Nielsen, Eli Lilly, and Abbot Laboratories.

Currently, Charisse works for Deloitte Consulting and is driven to understand client needs in order to use innovative technology to help solve various problems that develop.